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New Data Point Blame at Gun Makers

As many as half the handguns used in crimes had been purchased from federally licensed dealers within the prior three years, passing far more quickly from manufacturer to dealer to criminal than previously believed, according to new Federal law-enforcement data that are expected to play a major role in suits against the handgun industry.

That finding, along with other evidence that is emerging in the suits, challenges a long-held view that most guns used in crimes are stolen, say academic experts, gun-control advocates and lawyers suing the gun makers. They say the data show that many handguns enter an illegal black market even as they leave the store, contrary to the industry's argument that its dealers are not the source and that measures like better inventory control and tighter regulation would do little to keep guns from criminals.

''The data is hugely significant, because it shows that there is a stream of guns, especially semiautomatic handguns, that are moving very rapidly out of gun stores into the hands of criminals,'' said David Kennedy, a researcher at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of the Boston Gun Project, which has helped reduce juvenile violence in Boston by identifying and cracking down on gun dealers who sell to minors.

''It means this is something we can fix,'' Mr. Kennedy said.

Spokesmen for the gun industry call the statistics exaggerated and argue that in any case, the length of time between sale and crime is a poor gauge of whether a gun has most likely been stolen.

One of the first tests of the research's significance will be in New York, where Hamilton v. Accu-Tek, a suit brought by the relatives of victims of gun violence, is scheduled for trial this January in the Federal District Court in Brooklyn. This suit, like one brought by the City of Chicago, accuses gun makers of creating a public hazard by flooding the market with their products and, through negligence in distribution control, virtually guaranteeing that some guns will wind up in the hands of people who have no business owning them.

A study prepared for the plaintiffs in the Hamilton case, based on data compiled by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, contends that nearly 40 percent of the handguns used in crimes around the country had been purchased from licensed dealers within the preceding three years.

The bureau itself, which is collecting the data as part of a major new effort to trace the origins of handguns confiscated in crimes, has reported that 48.8 percent of the confiscated guns that it could trace had been sold by a dealer within the previous three years.

''I think there is a large segment of gun makers who should know that criminals and young people are a large share of their market,'' said Kristen Rand, a lawyer for the Violence Policy Center, an advocacy group in Washington. ''The great unknown is whether they deliberately turn a blind eye because they don't want to know what is happening.''

Guns legally move from a manufacturer to a distributor and then to licensed dealers. But the new data suggest that many handguns enter the illegal market through dealers' selling them to straw purchasers acting for another customer, to out-of-town buyers who cannot legally buy guns back home or to buyers who lack gun permits.

In Chicago, for example, which has one of the nation's most restrictive gun laws, undercover officers recently went to suburban dealers and were able to buy guns while posing as members of city street gangs. Chicago is using evidence from that sting operation to seek hundreds of millions of dollars in its own lawsuit against gun makers.

Both the analysis prepared for the Hamilton case and the data compiled by the Federal firearms agency are strongly disputed by the gun industry. ''Obviously if a gun is stolen, it can be stolen when it is young, so their assumption is incorrect, that short 'time to crime' means the gun is purchased by a criminal and not stolen,'' said James P. Dorr, a Chicago lawyer who represents three of the gun makers named in the Hamilton suit: the Smith & Wesson Corporation, which is owned by Tomkins P.L.C.; Sturm, Ruger & Company, and the Colt's Manufacturing Company.

In addition, Mr. Dorr said, the analysis in the Hamilton suit and the firearms agency's own estimate fail to take sufficient account of the large number of guns that for any of several reasons -- their age, perhaps, or the erasure of their serial numbers -- cannot be traced to the manufacturer and licensed dealers.

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But officials of both the agency and its parent, the Treasury Department, said their data had been carefully weighted to include those guns that could not be traced. That is why the agency provided a range, one official said, with a low estimate that 26.6 percent of all guns seized in crimes had been purchased within the last three years -- along with the high estimate of 48.8 percent, reflecting only those guns traced to the dealer.

The figures were based on a study of all handguns seized by the police in 17 cities, New York among them, during 1996 and 1997.

The estimates in the Hamilton case are based on a different set of data: the firearms agency's figures on confiscated handguns traced nationwide from 1989 to 1997. These estimates were prepared by economists with National Economic Research Associates, New York consultants who often provide expert testimony for corporations.

The economists, working for Elisa Barnes, the lawyer who filed the Hamilton suit, also estimated from firearms agency data that 23 to 25 percent of all handguns sold from 1989 to 1992 had been used in a crime by the end of 1997, and that 54 percent of handguns used in a crime in New York State had been purchased within the preceding three years.

In addition, the economists estimated from the agency's data that 90 percent of handguns used in crimes in New York State were originally sold in other states. More than half the handguns used in crimes in New York, the economists concluded, were brought in from just five states, all with lax gun-control laws: Virginia, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.

Statistical analysis proves, the economists said, that the sales in these states with weak gun-control laws ''are higher than can be explained by legitimate demand -- suggesting that a substantial proportion of sales in such states are not for legitimate purposes but for resale to the criminal market.'' This, they said, amounts to gun makers' deliberately oversupplying dealers in these Southern states, knowing that the excess guns will be taken to states like New York with strong gun laws.

A review of depositions by some of the 50 gun makers being sued in the Hamilton case, the economists said, ''suggests that many if not all manufacturers deliberately chose not to exercise any supervision over the distributors and dealers to which they sell.''

That, Mr. Dorr said, is ''absolutely incorrect.'' Such accusations ''ignore the regulatory system'' in which all dealers must be federally licensed and all handgun sales are ''pre-approved'' by law-enforcement officials, under either the Brady Law or equivalent state laws. If there are rogue dealers selling to criminals, he said, it is up to law enforcement to arrest them.

Moreover, Mr. Dorr said, although the firearms agency usually communicates with the manufacturer when doing a trace of a gun seized in a crime, it does not disclose anything about the crime, or even that there has been one, leaving the gun maker in the dark about whether its product has actually been used for criminal purposes.

Ms. Barnes, the lawyer in the Hamilton suit, said gun makers could reduce the number of guns flowing to criminals by adopting modern inventory control and other strict distribution standards. Such measures are already widely used by the makers of other hazardous products, like scuba gear and certain chemicals and paints.

Coincidentally, the five-day waiting period required before buying a handgun under the Brady Law will expire on Monday. It is supposed to be replaced by a system in which gun dealers can immediately get information, from computers set up by the Federal Bureau of Investigation or state police agencies, on whether a customer is a convicted felon. But Ms. Rand, of the Violence Policy Center, said that ''nobody knows what will happen'' on Monday, because Congress has not approved sufficient money to create the F.B.I. system and many states have moved slowly to set up databases of their own.